Daughter of a Guangdong Province army officer and eldest of eight children. A finance job at a foreign paper-products trading company gave her the idea to start her own business. In 1985 she moved to Hong Kong and, with $4,000 in savings, set up a company importing waste paper. Five years later she and her husband, a Taiwan-born Brazilian national, trained as a dentist, traveled to California to open a paper recycler that would ship its output to China. In 1995 she returned to China and, with her husband and brother, started paper manufacturer Nine Dragons (whose name implies "highest fortune"), of which she is chairman. It went public in March 2006; now all three are billionaires. Hopes the business will stay in the family for "100 years.